Feb 12, 2009

Firefox 3.1 and 3.2 for hardy, intrepid and jaunty

Firefox 3.1 is creeping closer to its release and Mozilla has already started to look ahead to the browser’s next major update. (If you want a sneak peek at what’s in store for Firefox 3.2, you can read more here...)

For Ubuntu, Alexander Sack reports that there's now a daily PPA for bleeding edge Mozilla packages set up and running.

A main reason to track those daily builds is to notice packaging or upstream regressions as they come. Its much easier and more efficient to fix bugs if we have a narrow regression window than debugging something whose commit we cannot easily spot.

To get things started we added firefox-3.1 (xulrunner-1.9.1) and firefox-3.2 (xulrunner-1.9.2) to our daily build bot for now; more packages will be added based on demand and time.

Fortunately, the ubuntu mozillateam uses packaging techniques having backporters in mind and hence can easily provide the same builds for all “current” ubuntu releases (meaning: hardy, intrepid, jaunty are supported for now).

One of the new features being worked on forFirefox 3.2 is Ubiquity (No not the Ubuntu installer).

Feel free to spread this around and encourage advanced users and mozilla fans to track that PPA, but remember that the daily packages are auto built without much testing and hence you might end up in unexpected bugs. So, be prepared to downgrade to the previous daily when that happens.

Also keep in mind that you shouldn’t file regressions of those daily packages in launchpad. Instead come to #ubuntu-mozillateam and let us know directly (alternatively send a mail to mailto:ubuntu-mozillateam@lists.ubuntu.com).